Global cloud traffic will nearly triple over the next five years, accounting for 95% of total datacenter traffic by 2021, as per Cisco GCI report.
Cisco Global Cloud Index (2016-2021), company’s seventh annual report, focuses on data center virtualization and cloud computing. The report reveals that both consumer and business applications are driving the cloud adoption.
The datacenter traffic is rapidly growing, and it global cloud IP traffic will touch 19.5 ZB (zettabytes) per year by 2021, up from just 6 ZB a year in 2016. On the other hand, Big data will reach 403 EB (exabytes) by 2021, growing 8-times from 25 EB in 2016. It alone will represent 30% of the overall datacenter traffic.
With rapid rise in demands for datacenter and cloud resources, the large-scale public cloud datacenters called hyperscale datacenters have been developed. Hyperscale datacenter count in 2016 was 338, which will grow to 628 by 2021, representing 53% of all installed datacenter servers. 
“Data center application growth is clearly exploding in this new multicloud world. This projected growth will require new innovations especially in the areas of public, private and hybrid clouds,” said Kip Compton, Vice President of Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Solutions Group.
According to the study, 94% of workloads and compute instances will be on cloud data center, while only 6% by traditional datacenters by 2021.
Of the total cloud workloads and compute instances, SaaS will comprise 75%, followed by IaaS (16%) and PaaS (9%) in 2021. 
The improvements in data control and datacenter governance have reduced the security issues, which are major barriers to cloud adoption. Additionally, the advanced technologies like internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) will also increase datacenter demands.
The IoT applications like smart cars, smart cities, connected health and digital utilities need storage solutions and scalable computing. The IoT connections are expected to reach 13.7 billion by 2021, up from 5.8 billion in 2016. The data created by IoT devices will grow from 218 ZB per year in 2016, to 847 ZB per year in 2021.
Also read: Cisco unveils its own container platform for multicloud environments
Cisco GCI 2016–2021 report concludes that along with the growth in datacenter traffic, the datacenters are also streamlining with architectural innovations like NFV and SDN. The cloud traffic will more than triple over the forecast period, where the major traffic will be enabled by rapid extension of datacenter virtualization.
